Friedman Benda will present Fernando and Humberto Campana in an immersive exhibition devoted to the theme of Hybridism, their second solo show at the gallery following Concepts in 2013. The exhibits are assemblages of materials and visual themes drawn from the Brothers’ immediate surroundings and will include deeply personal reflections and gestures juxtaposed with classical motifs.

Hybridism, informed by details, moods, and emotions, marks a point of departure for Estudio Campana as its most sculptural body of work to date. Evinced from the Campanas’ daily lives, such as Humberto’s early morning runs throughout São Paulo’s parks as well as the idea of nature weaving through urban fabric and our own imagination. The brothers meld the personal with the formal and assemble ideas, materials, methods of making, shapes and texture.

Humberto Campana explains, “With this exhibition we are playing much more with sculpture than with functionality. We manifest a dialogue between designer, artist, and sculptor. Fernando and I try to jump into the assemblage process unconsciously, allowing us a freedom and immediacy that goes beyond our practice to date.”

This exhibition is an evolutionary culmination of the famed São Paulo studio practice of the past decade. The studio has experienced a multidisciplinary explosion in research of materials, means of production, collaborations with artisans within regions of Brazil and craftsmen across the world. At a time of cultural and political upheaval in Brazil, the studio continues to lead the cutting edge of design and collaboration with local and historical centers of craftsmanship in South America.

A Line Can Go Anywhere surveys the use of fiber as the primary material in the work of seven Bay Area artists. Practitioners of what has historically been called fiber art, all of the artists use linear pliable elements such as thread, yarn, string, monofilament, and rope. While not a movement in the conventional sense, Bay Area artists working with linear pliable elements were and continue to be radical makers working among more celebrated movements such as Bay Area Figurative Painting, Funk, and Pop. Including works made between the 1950s and the present, A Line Can Go Anywhere begins with two artists whose works serve as a primer for a history of art making in Northern California. Trude Guermonprez and Ed Rossbach were influential artists and teachers whose work, though too little known today, contributed to a categorical transformation of art and craft. A Line Can Go Anywhere connects these two key figures to works by Josh Faught, Terri Friedman, Alexandra Jacopetti Hart, Ruth Laskey, and Kay Sekimachi.

The term fiber art encompasses both the use of pliable materials and the techniques used to construct art works, primarily knotting and weaving. The included works, whether conceived at an intimate or large scale, revel in the plasticity and potency of fiber. Crisscrossing generations, nationalities, processes, and approaches, the works speak to the cultural forces and art discourses that have contributed to a rich, and often overlooked, legacy of art making, from the initial efflorescence of the international fiber revolution of the 1960s to fiber’s recent reclamation by contemporary artists who, in an expanded field of art, create fiber-based work with a kind of “post-fiber” awareness.
A snapshot of material, place, and sensibility, A Line Can Go Anywhere traces networks among artists that range from teacher-student, to material processes, to conceptual approaches. The exhibiting artists call home a part of the country that, since mid century, has been a locus for radical cultural and political changes. Studio Craft, the civil rights movement, hippie counterculture, feminism, shifting gender roles, and bold educational and art institutions took root at the western edge of the Golden State. Specifically, both Northern and Southern California hosted in the early 1970s significant fiber-related exhibitions featuring artists whose work transformed fiber from a material suitable to industry and craft to one capable of extending the categories of modern and contemporary art. A Line Can Go Anywhere showcases some artists working at what might be considered the center of the periphery while also highlighting the work of a new generation of artists committed to the material and conceptual potential of fiber.

Josh Faught (b. 1979 St. Louis; lives San Francisco) makes sculpture and wall works with all manner of objects and processes, mixing cultural codes of high and low. Party Favors collides a shadow weave pattern with piano keyboard fabric and a shopping list of novelty items, among other items—all of which Faught devotedly lists in the medium line. Such work celebrates fiber history and technique while destabilizing the category of craft. Faught deploys abstraction like a smoke screen behind which he loads references to queerness, hobby culture, and “othered” communities—whether gay histories, fiber art, or the often overlooked Pattern & Decoration movement. But at the core of so much of Faught’s work is the process of collecting, and the preservation and presentation of archives, especially ones in danger of disappearing—like those of generations of people lost to AIDS and those coping with that legacy.

Terri Friedman (b. 1962 Denver, Colorado; lives El Cerrito, California) adopts the materials and processes of traditional weaving but alters many of its conventions with acidic, bright yarns. As such, her large-scale works associate with contemporary painting as much as tapestry. Long interested in abstraction and painting, Friedman has only recently begun to use fiber, and one can perceive in her work the novice’s joy in simple techniques and even mistakes. She works on a vertical standing loom the size of which limits width to four foot-wide panels. These units are expanded with split warps and multi-panel installations. Friedman’s use of text, topical content, pop art stylings, and color evokes artists such as Sister Corita Kent and Amy Sillman. A recent body of work incorporated words that transmit the artist’s response to the 2016 Presidential election and its ongoing, tumultuous consequences: “SOS,” “Do not touch,”and “Awake.”

Trude Guermonprez (b. 1910 Danzig, Germany; died 1976 San Francisco), a European weaver trained in the Bauhaus tradition, emigrated to America in the late 1940s to join her family at Black Mountain College. Guermonprez taught weaving at the college, assuming Anni Albers’ classes during a sabbatical in 1947, and alongside Albers from 1948 to 1949. Guermonprez relocated to Northern California in 1949 to teach at Pond Farm Workshops, a working community of crafts masters led by potter Marguerite Wildenhain. Guermonprez made experimental weavings alongside commissions for industry and private clients, and from 1952 until her premature death in 1976, she taught at the California College of Arts & Crafts in Oakland (now California College of the Arts) where she instructed and influenced countless artists and weavers. Guermonprez’s abstract weavings demonstrate her allegiance to Bauhaus principles of material and process, as well as weaving’s associations with painting. Calico Cat (1953) is a personal work that pays homage to a painting she owned by Paul Klee, as well as her love of cats. (Kay Sekimachi bought this work from the artist.) Guermonprez’s weavings, restrained in both subject and palette, transitioned into larger and more experimental forms in the 1960s just as the fiber art movement took off. Her space hangings marked a departure both in color and form, and above all related to sculpture. Notes to John I and II (1966) show her progression into text and symbols, a shift in her oeuvre but very much a reflection of new modes of incorporating text in art inspired, in part, by the counterculture.

In 1974 Alexandra Jacopetti Hart (b. 1939 Preston, Idaho; lives Sebastopol, California) completed a now legendary public play structure entirely of knotted rope in Bolinas, Californi. Macramé Park was her own initiative, made with volunteers, and it remained in use throughout the 1970s. Its making and “premier” are documented in Ben van Meter’s rarely seen documentary film, itself a period piece of a time and place. Jacopetti Hart is also a weaver working in the tradition of tapestry. Her monochromatic Nebulae imposes the endless grid structure of the loom onto pliable elements. Like others who pursued anti-materialist lives, Jacopetti Hart sewed and embroidered her clothes as a means of thrift, repair, and self-expression. She made elaborately embroidered garments, even co-founding Folkwear Patterns for home sewers and needleworkers. Sensing a groundswell, she and photographer Jerry Wainwright co-published a book celebrating Bay Area contemporary fashion and folk art. Native Funk and Flash (1974) was extraordinarily popular and though out-of-print continues to inspire artists and craftspeople.

Ruth Laskey’s (b. 1975 San Luis Obispo; lives San Francisco) loom weavings are formal exercises in line and color, figure and ground, structure and surface. Laskey studied painting but, dissatisfied with applying paint to canvas, she began to weave her own blank canvases on which to paint before embracing the painterly qualities of weaving with color. Like her predecessors Anni Albers and Trude Guermonprez, Laskey explores and expands the limitations of thread and loom. The strength of Laskey’s work is in the structural rules she applies to its making. She limits herself to linen, dye, and the twill weaving pattern (a diagonal that diverges from plain weave’s right angle grid). Works are titled after the commercial dyes used to tint the thread. Laskey works in series, with each new body of work proposing either a relationship between a straight line and a diagonal, two interlocking colors, or shifting degrees of diagonals. Though two dimensional and optical, Laskey considers her works objects that embrace both painting and sculpture.

Ed Rossbach (b. 1914 Chicago; d. 2002 Berkeley) should be classified as a fiber postmodernist for his devotion to the textile traditions of worldwide cultures. His work references everything from ancient textile fragments to Mickey Mouse, all the while exploring structure and form. Like Funk and assemblagist artists, Rossbach used newspaper, found objects, garbage bags, and plastic novelty trinkets, among other non-art materials. He reveled in humble and atypical materials, courting awkwardness and anti-form, to create one of the most diverse bodies of work to be categorized as fiber. But unlike some fiber artists who made large scale work to attain parity with sculpture, Rossbach was ever faithful to intimate scale, to restless experimentation, to wry humor, to handcraft. His works in this exhibition demonstrate a range of techniques and scales, from basketry to knotless netting, looping, lacemaking, and jacquard. Despite being a prolific maker, writer, and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, between 1950 and 1979, Rossbach, by his own choice, seldom exhibited or sold his work. Still, his impact on generations of artists is profound.

Kay Sekimachi (b. 1926 San Francisco; lives in Berkeley) studied with Trude Guermonprez during summer sessions at CCA in the 1950s. Though Sekimachi had studied art and weaving intermittently for years, her work was charged by Guermonprez’s pedagogical emphasis on both free experimentation and the rational logic of weaving. Sekimachi’s early double weavings demonstrate a gifted facility with harmonizing opposites: density and translucency, complexity and simplicity, technique and free expression. She began to make sculpture in the 1960s just as the international fiber movement was taking shape. Between 1964 and 1974 she used monofilament to make a series of sculptures that hung in space—a galvanizing break with pictorial weaving’s wall-bound condition. Made on multi-harness looms, the sculptures were limited in color to black or white. For seven decades Sekimachi has worked with pliable elements, especially monofilament, thread, and paper, making experimental works that fold together Japanese and American traditions. Her recent series of small-scale, subtle weavings pay homage to painter Agnes Martin.

Note: The title of this exhibition honors Ruth Asawa, another Bay Area artist who worked with linear pliable elements. She said of her favored material, “I was interested in [wire] because of the economy of a line, making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out. It’s still transparent. I realized that if I was going to make these forms, which interlock and interweave, it can only be done with a line because a line can go anywhere.” Though Asawa’s work could not be secured for this exhibition, her work and its logic are essential to the history and sensibility of the Bay Area. Asawa is the subject of a solo exhibition on view at David Zwirner Gallery.

Jenelle Porter is an independent curator in Los Angeles. From 2011 to 2015 she was the Mannion Family Senior Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston where she organized the acclaimed “Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present,” as well as monographic exhibitions of Arlene Shechet, Erin Shirreff, Mary Reid Kelley, Jeffrey Gibson, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Dianna Molzan, and Christina Ramberg, among others. Porter has worked as a curator for over twenty years, including positions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Artists Space, Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to present Revising Making-Nice, Marcelyn McNeil’s second solo show at the gallery.

Marcelyn McNeil’s latest large-scale abstract oil paintings react against the tendency to overly manicure work. While her strong sense of color remains, McNeil strives to loosen up and broaden her vocabulary. She combines poured paint, fades, and drawing to create new relationships between softer forms.

High-pitched color amplifies the energy that has always existed in McNeil’s work, but now there is a greater sense of playfulness, sensuality, and risk. The interplay of competing elements activates the paintings so that they nearly feel animated. They are exuberant yet quietly confident, fueled by off-kilter humor and anthropomorphism.

Yet McNeil is steadfastly a modernist in that she remains faithful to the flatness of the surface, eschewing modeling or linear perspective to create the illusion of depth through color and shape. Formalism moves freely in and out of her work. Her compositions appear both carefully considered and the result of intuitive exploration.

Marcelyn McNeil has been exhibited throughout the United States including at the Wichita Center for the Arts, the Texas Biennial, the University of Dallas, and the Harvester Arts Center, among other institutions. She received a MacDowell Colony Fellowship in 2011, and was rewarded the Visual Artist of the Year by the Decorative Arts Center Houston in 2015, along with other accolades. She has a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She lives and works in Houston, TX.

Margaret Thatcher Projects is pleased to present minimal invasiv, the fifth solo-exhibition of hand-carved marble sculptures by artists Venske & Spänle. Taking visual and conceptual inspiration from the realms of sci-fi, cartoon animation and an innate sense of playful humor, this Munich-based duo is deeply interested in the interaction between sculpture, place, and viewer.

Regarding these biomorphic sculptures as alien-like entities taken from their original place of creation to travel the world through a myriad of different exhibitions, the sculptures have now landed in New York to “invade” the scene like otherworldly creatures, spreading their species under the radar. The artists further push this notion by documenting their sculptures interacting in site-specific locations. Often times, their works assert their presence in spaces that may otherwise be overlooked, such as Helotroph Foum Squitt where the sculpture finds a temporary home in the middle of a rock desert in Morocco. Chapeau Malienne rests on an African boy’s head, becoming a regal crown for a local village man.

Perhaps the most “invasive” piece in the exhibition is L’Osservatore/The Observer. This piece houses a security camera as its eye, silently observing and recording all activities around it. Questions of where this entity came from and what its intent is immediately arise. Curiosity lures the viewer to interact with this strange thing, resulting in a cross examination of what each is seeing, doing, and thinking. The unassuming nature of this cast of characters raises questions: have they quickly assimilated on the planet, or always belonged just where they stand?

Venske & Spänle is the moniker for the artists Julia Venske (b.1971, Berlin) and Gregor Spänle (b. 1969, Munich). The artists live and work in Munich, and have exhibited their work worldwide in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa. Recent solo museum exhibitions include the Museum de Bella Artes, Valencia, ES (2014) and Museum Bad Arolsen, Kassel, DE (2012). Permanent public installations of their work include Myzot Nachtwächter in Incheon, South Korea and Autoeater in Querceta, Italy. Autoeater is currently on display in Atlanta, GA for a three-year term for Atlanta’s Midtown Alliance Public Art Program.

Robert Jackʼs works reflect on microbiological systems and processes, making visible essential aspects of life that are overlooked due to their imperceptible scale. Replication, mutation, and other evolutionary processes have been the main source of inspiration for his paintings and drawings. The artworks featured in the exhibition are primarily fabricated with water and metal as the two essential components. Physically, the pigments are metallic compounds, primarily forms of iron. Water is the solvent for the casein paints. The colors of the pigments are subdued, complex, and earthy, allowing the color to support the structured compositions. The process for his work is slow, made through tiny monotonous marks as if assembling from bits of dust or dirt.

Robert Jack received his BS in Landscape Architecture from The City College of New York in 1994. His work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States as well as in Japan and Spain. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Mitchell-Innes & Nash is pleased to present an exhibition of installation, sculptures, and paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Amanda Ross-Ho: MY PEN IS HUGE, on view from September 7 to October 14, 2017. The exhibition is the gallery’s third solo exhibition with the artist, and will feature an installation of works that Ross-Ho will produce on-site at the gallery during the month of August including fabricated, oversized objects, and a series of paintings based on works on paper created over the past year.

Ross-Ho’s distinctive and diverse practice broadly engages material culture and artifacts of everyday life and work. For over a decade, her work has explored the ecology of the studio as a primary subject, engaging it through close forensic examination and reflexive call and response. Past works have imported the architectural entirety of the studio into galleries and museum spaces, enacted meticulous theatrical reenactments of authentic activity, and systematically amplified humble artifacts into monuments.

The use of scale shifting has also featured prominently in Ross-Ho’s work for many years. Utilizing it as a hyperbolic device to de-stabilize continuity alongside gestures of subtlety, her use of scale finds root in her formative experiences in photography, performance, and prop-making. For Ross-Ho, scaling is a method of describing intimacy through what she calls a sculptural ‘close up’ as well as understanding objects anatomically through theatrical and forensic recreation.

Last summer, Ross-Ho lost the lease on her Downtown Los Angeles warehouse studio of nine years, and was forced to put its contents into storage. Around the same time, she found a collection of vintage paper clock face dials on Ebay, being liquidated from a clock maker. Amputated from the mechanism and components that comprise their intact timepieces, the blank clock faces suggested a poetic potential and a vacant stage for activity. She bought them all, and to mitigate her studio transition while also maintaining a heavy exhibition and travel schedule, Ross-Ho began directly using the paper clock faces as work surfaces, which evolved over the course of a year as she spent time in in airplanes, hotel rooms, Airbnb apartments, as well as her own kitchen table. Over the course of many months, doodles, calculations, diagrams, lists, notes to self and other anxious scribbling—combined with the residue of her consumption of food and drink—aggregated on the surfaces of the clock faces. The resulting layered surfaces, dense with the recording of her daily activities of life and art, supplant the movement of a timepiece's usual mechanisms, and present a physical recording of the passage of time within the circuitry of a frenetic mind.

Rather than simply exhibit the clock faces as primary works, Ross-Ho will treat these works on paper as studies or rehearsals for a performative production to take place onsite in Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s gallery. Throughout the month of August, Ross-Ho will import a studio environment into the gallery, translating twelve of the clock works on paper into large-scale paintings produced in real time. By accelerating a year’s worth of work into a month, the performance is an act of compression, collapsing chronology as well as the environments of production and presentation. The result will be a hybrid installation consisting of the authentic residue of work, and the theatrical amplification of many of these same artifacts.

In addition to an assortment of specially fabricated objects that will be incorporated into the installation, the exhibition will also include oversized everyday objects that are already available in the marketplace, typically used as props or sold as ‘gag’ gifts. The use of oversized readymades is new for Ross-Ho, complicating her own visual language of scaling by looping her own production tendencies back to the existing mass-produced world of ‘novelty’ objects—calling attention to the circular and overlapping nature of all cultural production.

The title MY PEN IS HUGE derives from the bawdy novelty T-shirt design popularized sometime in the late 70’s or early 80’s. Its braggadocios yet feigned arrogance through juvenile wordplay could be a regressive look backwards, or sadly, a timely snapshot of contemporary American life, in which scale, power, and true meaning are all mutable constructs. By reclaiming and rewiring the power dynamic of this phrase, Ross-Ho takes back the pen, underscoring the heroics and fallibility of her own mark making.

Carey Young
Palais de Justice
SEPTEMBER 7 – OCTOBER 14, 2017
OPENING RECEPTION, SEPTEMBER 7, 6:00 – 8:00PM
534 W 21ST STREET
NEW YORK – Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to announce a one-person exhibition of recent work by Carey Young. The show will present Young’s video work Palais de Justice (2017), as well as a new series of photographs. The exhibition will be on view at Paula Cooper Gallery 534 West 21st Street from September 7th through October 14th, 2017.

Palais de Justice was filmed surreptitiously at the Palais de Justice in Brussels, a vast 19th century courthouse designed in an ornate late Neo-Baroque style. Contradicting the familiar patriarchal culture of law, Young’s concealed camera depicts female judges and lawyers at court. Sitting at trial, directing proceedings or delivering judgments, female judges are spied through a series of circular windows in courtroom doors. Palais de Justice subtly builds a counter-narrative – a legal system seemingly centered on, and perhaps controlled by women. Here, men and their iconography of patriarchal power are still present, but their usually dominant position is reversed. Male lawyers wait patiently and nervously outside courtrooms for a female judge to allow them in. They stand in front of their judge as she enters, and remain standing until she allows them to sit. They plead their case in front of female judges, who only occasionally bestow attention. As the piece develops, Young’s camera also captures younger female lawyers in a more intimate and personal way, either caught within reflections, or through becoming noticed by some of her subjects.

The piece develops Young’s interest in law, gender and performance, and considers the complex relations between lenses, surveillance and ideas of framing or being framed. Examined through the lens of contemporary politics, both within the United States and abroad, the film acts as a critical counterpoint to regressive trends towards autocratic government and limited civil rights, particularly those belonging to women.

For her new series of photographs, Young presents images of courthouse doorways. Titled Before the Law, after Franz Kafka’s 1915 parable in which the protagonist is continuously denied access to ‘the law,’ the series depicts these these doorways as metaphors for the legal system itself. Courtrooms are glimpsed in various ways – a red glow emanating from one entices us with its surprising warmth and seductiveness; a red velvet curtain in another calls to mind law’s reliance on aspects of theatre; in a third, a courtroom visible through a frosted glass window glows like an abstract painting, as if law’s abstractions may connect with artistic thinking in ways which have not yet been fully considered.

Born in 1970, Carey Young is British-American. Her work has been exhibited in prominent national and international exhibitions and has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions including Dallas Museum of Art, curated by Gavin Delahunty (2017); Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Raphael Gygax (2013); Eastside Projects, Birmingham, England (2010), which traveled to Cornerhouse, Manchester and MiMA, Middlesborough; Le Quartier, Quimper, France (2013); The Power Plant, Toronto (2009); and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2009). Young’s work has also been presented at the Taipei Biennial (2010), Tate Britain (2009), Moscow Biennale (2007), Modern Art Oxford (2007), Performa 05 and the Venice Biennale (2003). A monographic study of her work, Subject to Contract, was published by JRP Ringier in 2013. The artist is currently based in London, England.

For more information, please contact the gallery: (212) 255-1105 or info@paulacoopergallery.com

Thomas Eggerer’s new paintings in Todd, the artist’s sixth solo show at Petzel, present the viewer with aerial views of street surfaces—topographical evolutions of Eggerer’s longstanding interest in public spaces.

Each square canvas features precisely choreographed fragments of resting bodies, cutting in from the margins of the painting. This temporal occupation is contrasted with a circular “lid” or “cover” and intersecting parallel diagonals. The lids carry institutional significance, pointing to municipal authority, which contrasts with the transient fragility of leisurely carnal exposure. The lids also emphasize the presence of a concealed space underneath, quintessential to New York street life.

While the aerial viewpoint allows for voyeuristic surveillance, the 90 degree rotation from the birds-eye vista to the gallery wall, generates a vertiginous perspective where gravity and weight become factors. The resulting destabilization of a fixed viewing position is further augmented by the fact that the paintings appear to gyrate around the lids, subjecting the bodies to centrifugal forces and pointing to the space beyond the margins of the canvas.

The fragmentation of the bodies has a limiting effect on the bodies’ self-determination, and yet, perhaps as a consequence, it intensifies the fetishistic charge of the exposed skin, which is rendered in great detail like all other parts of the paintings. This attention to detail appears to be a new development in Eggerer’s work, which has previously exploited tensions between line and color or the “finished” vs. the “unfinished”. Hands appear to play a particular role here; while the purpose of the body as a whole is often unclear, manual activities are rendered with exacting precision (touching, holding, pushing). These gestures and poses appear somewhat out of place in a public space. The street floor is not treated like a part of the urban arena but rather like a natural domestic habitat.

Petzel Gallery is located at 456 West 18th Street New York, NY 10011. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 AM–6:00 PM.

New York City in the fall. The scorching summer heat fades, leaves start changing to buttery yellows and burgundy reds, and the sound of a saxophone player in a Central Park archway sounds like a romantic lullaby taking us back to another time, an older New York. In this sense, the photographs of Herman Leonard are a twofold experience as well, giving viewers an intimate encounter with some of rhythm and blues greats, while conjuring the intense sensation of sound and atmosphere. Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to present Herman Leonard: The Rhythm of Old New York, a symphonic collection of the artist’s iconic images of New York jazz that capture, in velvet tones and poetic compositions, the coolest cats in town.

Considered one of the most prominent jazz photographers, Herman Leonard was born the son of Romanian immigrants in Allentown, Pennsylvania. After witnessing an image being developed in his brother's darkroom at the young age of nine, Leonard became enthralled with the magic of photography. In 1947, he graduated from Ohio University with bachelor of fine arts in photography, after which he spent a year as an apprentice to master Canadian portrait photographer, Yousuf Karsh. Later assignments would take him to East Asia, where in the 1950s he served as Marlon Brando’s personal photographer, and Paris, where he worked as a correspondent for Playboy and Time magazines.

Leonard’s most enduring pursuit was quintessentially American: jazz. It was this passion for music that led him to establish a studio in the heart of Greenwich Village in 1949. He ventured to the swinging clubs of Broadway, 52nd Street and Harlem. While shooting at The Royal Roost, Birdland, and Bop City, he photographed and developed friendships with some of the legends of jazz history, including Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Chet Baker, and many more. Making use of techniques like backlighting to set his subjects apart from the background, Leonard gracefully captured a world of shadow, dark interiors, gleaming microphones, and feathery wisps of cigarette smoke that dance to the beat, while captivating viewers in the energy and emotion of the moment.

Leonard’s works are found in numerous public collections including the Smithsonian Institute, Lincoln Center, and the George Eastman House, as well as the private collections of Sir Elton John, Bruce Bernard, and President Bill Clinton. While his New Orleans studio and at least 8,000 original prints were destroyed in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina, his complete collection of over 35,000 negatives survived and have been fully archived through a grant from the Grammy Foundation. Through this, the timeless photographs of Herman Leonard forever hold the spirit of the dark ambient tones of New York jazz clubs and the icons that played them.

Sikkema Jenkins and Co. is Compelled to present
The most Astounding and Important Painting show of the fall Art Show viewing season!

Collectors of Fine Art will Flock to see the latest Kara Walker offerings, and what is she offering but the Finest Selection of artworks by an African-American Living Woman Artist this side of the Mississippi. Modest collectors will find her prices reasonable, those of a heartier disposition will recognize Bargains! Scholars will study and debate the Historical Value and Intellectual Merits of Miss Walker’s Diversionary Tactics. Art Historians will wonder whether the work represents a Departure or a Continuum. Students of Color will eye her work suspiciously and exercise their free right to Culturally Annihilate her on social media. Parents will cover the eyes of innocent children. School Teachers will reexamine their art history curricula. Prestigious Academic Societies will withdraw their support, former husbands and former lovers will recoil in abject terror. Critics will shake their heads in bemused silence. Gallery Directors will wring their hands at the sight of throngs of the gallery-curious flooding the pavement outside. The Final President of the United States will visibly wince. Empires will fall, although which ones, only time will tell.

Artist’s Statement

I don’t really feel the need to write a statement about a painting show. I know what you all expect from me and I have complied up to a point. But frankly I am tired, tired of standing up, being counted, tired of “having a voice” or worse “being a role model.” Tired, true, of being a featured member of my racial group and/or my gender niche. It’s too much, and I write this knowing full well that my right, my capacity to live in this Godforsaken country as a (proudly) raced and (urgently) gendered person is under threat by random groups of white (male) supremacist goons who flaunt a kind of patched together notion of race purity with flags and torches and impressive displays of perpetrator-as-victim sociopathy. I roll my eyes, fold my arms and wait. How many ways can a person say racism is the real bread and butter of our American mythology, and in how many ways will the racists among our countrymen act out their Turner Diaries race war fantasy combination Nazi Germany and Antebellum South – states which, incidentally, lost the wars they started, and always will, precisely because there is no way those white racisms can survive the earth without the rest of us types upholding humanity’s best, keeping the motor running on civilization, being good, and preserving nature and all the stuff worth working and living for?

Anyway, this is a show of works on paper and on linen, drawn and collaged using ink, blade, glue and oil stick. These works were created over the course of the Summer of 2017 (not including the title, which was crafted in May). It’s not exhaustive, activist or comprehensive in any way.

About the Artist

New York-based artist Kara Walker is best known for her candid investigation of race, gender, sexuality, and violence through silhouetted figures that have appeared in numerous exhibitions worldwide.

Born in Stockton, California in 1969, Walker was raised in Atlanta, Georgia from the age of 13. She studied at the Atlanta College of Art (BFA, 1991) and the Rhode Island School of Design (MFA, 1994). She is the recipient of many awards, notably the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award in 1997 and the United States Artists, Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship in 2008. In 2012, Walker became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work can be found in museums and public collections throughout the United States and Europe including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Tate Gallery, London; and the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo (MAXXI), Rome.

Walker will participate in Prospect New Orleans art triennial opening in November. Her contribution, a wagon-mounted steam calliope that will play a composition by jazz pianist Jason Moran, will be sited on Algiers Point where slaves entering New Orleans were held before transport across the river to be sold.

Walker currently lives and works in New York City and is the Tepper Chair in the Visual Arts at Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts.

Through a survey of the diverse oeuvres of the aforementioned thirteen artists, Pathways examines how art can blur the lines between fantasy and reality. For example, Enrico Ambrosio’s digital explosions of color and light are contrasted with Nancy Mclean’s dynamically textured, whimsical adaptations of everyday scenes and objects. Meanwhile, Alaleh Ostad reinterprets traditional landscape scenes by transforming them into dynamic, abstract compositions through energetic swirls of oil paint on canvas. The exhibition considers these motifs through a myriad of media, including paintings, sculpture, digital compositions, photography, and multimedia collages. The innovative use of various materials and media by each of the artists in Pathways presents the viewer with the opportunity to overstep the boundary of the real into the ethereal.

Pathways will open on September 26th, with an opening reception on September 28th from 6-8pm, and will remain open until October 17th, 2017.

About Agora Gallery
Agora Gallery is a contemporary fine art gallery located in the heart of Chelsea’s fine art district in New York. Established in 1984, Agora Gallery specializes in connecting art dealers and collectors with national and international artists. The art gallery’s expert consultants are available to assist corporate and private clients in procuring original artwork to meet their organization’s specific needs and budget requirements. With a strong online presence and popular online gallery, ARTmine, coupled with the spacious and elegant physical gallery space, the work of our talented artists, who work in diverse media and styles, can receive the attention it deserves. Over the years Agora Gallery has sponsored and catered to special events aimed at fostering social awareness and promoting the use of art to help those in need.

Chambers Fine Art is pleased to announce the opening on September 7, 2017 of The Whip by Yang Jiechang. Born in Foshan, Guangdong Province, China in 1956, Yang studied paper mounting, folk art, and traditional Chinese painting at the Foshan Folk Art Research Institute (1974 -1978) and Chinese painting at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, Guangzhou (1978 -1982). In the early 1980s he also studied Dao at the Daoist temple Chongxu on Mount Luofu, a major influence on his way of life and artistic practice.

Invited to participate in the influential exhibition Les Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou, Paris in 1989, Yang was represented by four large works in which the calligraphic impulse was replaced by concentration on the basic elements of ink painting – ink, water and paper. Known as Hundred Layers of Ink, this series of works was to be his major pre-occupation throughout the 1990s. Since 1989 Yang has been based in Paris and Heidelberg.
Yang has described his first decade in Europe as one of introspection and reinvention. “Reviewing these works now,” he has commented,” I realize that I was immersed in silence in anticipating the arrival of another era.” This exhibition focuses on works in ink executed between 1999 and 2017 that reveal much greater stylistic diversity. Although he has added video, installation, and performance to his repertoire, ink painting remains his core practice, and it is his unmistakable brushwork that underpins these various works. Jiechang now feels free to utilize whichever of the three major disciplines of traditional Chinese painting - calligraphy, ink painting, and meticulous color painting (gongbi) – is most appropriate for his immediate needs, and all three are represented among the works shown here.

As an art form, calligraphy is inseparable from the Chinese language but resident in Europe since 1989, Yang speaks not only Cantonese and Mandarin, but also English, German and French in a highly idiosyncratic manner. His calligraphy is equally unorthodox, obeying none of the rules nor conforming to any of the major styles. “When I am doing calligraphy today,” he has said, “I too rarely do it according to the rules. There is not one brushstroke that is not mistake, all are wrong, not one is good, which makes them all harmonizing in the end.” In the current exhibition the words Difficult (2008) and God (2014) are unlikely candidates for the expressive calligraphic transformation they undergo. Heaven and Earth in One Stroke #2 and #4 (2017) are celebrations of dynamic brushwork for its own sake, while The Steps of the Great Yu (1999) refers to a dance step of religious Daoism.

In complete contrast to the calligraphic works is Golden Mountain (2012-2017) a three-panel landscape which is executed in the meticulous style known as gongbi. Labor-intensive as it is, Yang has turned to this technique repeatedly and generally for very large works as in Crying Landscape (2002) a set of five triptychs first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2003. Golden Mountain is associated with a group of works that began with Tale of the 11th Day – Golden Day (2011-2012), eight panels representing animals of different species and human beings in a golden landscape. First conceived during the world financial crisis of 2007-2008, Yang’s ambitious sequence of paintings creates an alternative world in which harmony between different species offers an unsettling perspective on current economic and social trends.

Among contemporary Chinese artists Yang Jiechang has established himself as a uniquely provocative figure, an expatriate for nearly thirty years yet still deeply immersed in Chinese cultural and artistic traditions. Fully aware of the distinctiveness of his position, he has commented that “I keep a certain distance from the convention of figurative painting proper to socialist realism and globalized capitalism, but I also avoid rushing headlong into the ancient conventions of abstract and conceptual calligraphy. That is why I think my art is very particular, very disturbing both in China and the West.”

Alexander Gray Associates presents Polly Apfelbaum: The Potential of Women, the artist’s first exhibition at the Gallery. The exhibition features all new work, including gouache drawings, hand-woven rugs, and wall-mounted ceramics. The key visual motif comes from the 1963 book, The Potential of Woman, published in conjunction with a symposium of the same name.

Apfelbaum draws inspiration from graphic designer Rudolph deHarek’s cover design for The Potential of Woman, which features a flattened, stylized view of a female figure’s head. Her appropriation of this image, chosen as an icon, is consistent with her ongoing interest in applied design and popular culture. Apfelbaum was also fascinated by the book’s provocative and ultimately patronizing message. The book and its related symposium imagined a future in which women might be useful contributors; Apfelbaum instead reflects the desire for a broader appreciation and empowerment of legions of capable women in the present. In the exhibition’s title, Apfelbaum changes the word ‘woman’ to ‘women’ to reinforce an inclusive communal narrative around feminism.

In the second floor Gallery, the artist has created an immersive environment, in which she occupies and transforms the entire space with four rugs, painted walls, and dozens of wall-mounted ceramics. Critic Christopher Knight has described her similarly expansive 2016 installation at Otis College of Art as a “secular chapel of abstract art,” an association that Apfelbaum invites. The rugs, the central element of the installation, deploy deHarek’s graphic design in orange, pink, tan, and black; they were woven in Oaxaca by Zapotec artisans indigenous to the region using their traditional weaving and dying methods. The walls are painted in large horizontal stripes of orange, pink, and white, matching the tones used in the original book cover. Intimately-scaled abstract ceramic portraits are hung around the walls to mimic what the artist describes as a a participatory audience for the work, much like “a Greek Chorus that gives voice to the performance.” Apfelbaum has depicted another crowd of women in polychromatic gouache drawings installed on the ground floor of Gallery. She renders the same face appropriated from the cover of The Potential of Woman in a variety of sizes, and color spectrums, creating a kaleidoscopic effect. Her use of vibrant dense pigment here is a tribute to Josef Albers’ landmark book on color theory, Interaction of Color, also printed in 1963, emblematic of her fusion of of pop-cultural and art historic references.

With the recurrent aesthetic of accumulation and diverse color saturations, Apfelbaum expands the visuals of the political landscapes surrounding the 2017 election and its resulting activism. Collectively, her densely populated drawings, row of ceramics, pay homage to the recent resurgent prominence of women’s marches and enforce the power of community to engage in collective action and activism.

Allan Stone Projects is pleased to present John Graham: Artist Sweating Blood, on view from September 7 – October 21, 2017. Selected from the Allan Stone Collection, the exhibition highlights examples of Graham’s evolving style from the 1920s to the 1950s. The eleven paintings and thirteen works on paper in the exhibition integrate Cubist, Surrealist and Neoclassical influences with wide-ranging esoteric content.

John Graham was crucial to the development of the New York School. Coming from Europe, Graham imparted the tenets of the European avant-garde to burgeoning Modernists and Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, and others. His interest in various cultural phenomena such as alchemy, numerology, Kabbalah, and psychology was the result of his voracious investigation of collective knowledge. Most importantly, Graham introduced to his peers and followers the idea of the unconscious as a tool for creating art. Graham’s preoccupation with personal mythology positioned him as a master of reinvention, promoting the “artist-as-alchemist,” a critical Post-Modern concept.

This year, the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY mounted a major retrospective, John Graham: Maverick Modernist. He was featured in the traveling exhibition American Vanguards: Graham, Davis, Gorky, de Kooning and Their Circle, in 2012 organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, NY. Allan Stone, who had one of the largest collections of Graham's work, organized a comprehensive survey, John Graham: Sum Qui Sum, at the Allan Stone Gallery in 2005. Graham’s works are in numerous public collections, such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Phillips Collection.

John Graham was born Ivan Dambrowski in Kiev (then Czarist Russia, now Ukraine) in 1886. He studied law and served as a cavalry officer for the Czar in World War I, until the Bolsheviks imprisoned him in 1918. Either escaping or being released, Graham made his way to New York via Paris in 1920. He matriculated at the Art Student’s League where he studied under John Sloan. In 1937, he wrote System and Dialectics in Art, which heavily influenced Jackson Pollock. In 1942, he organized one of the earliest exhibitions of the Abstract Expressionists for the McMillen Gallery that featured works by Stuart Davis, David Burliuk, de Kooning, Krasner, Pollock, as well as works by Picasso, Braque, and Matisse. In the 1950’s Graham largely withdrew from the art world and eventually relocated to London in 1961 where he passed away.

Central to Thompson’s practice is an inquiry into the production, distribution, and exhibition of painting. His projects, which often span several years, impose structures and constraints onto the making of his work. These limitations are in turn generative, resulting in exhaustive investigations into the medium of painting and the problems that surround it. Tying his works to mathematical and economic formulas, his own labor as an artist, and the architecture that his paintings occupy, Thompson enacts a tension between their formal qualities, and the larger systems of circulation they inhabit.

For the exhibition, Thompson continues his series of quantity paintings, in which a total volume of pigment proportionate to the surface area of the canvas is divided through the use of the random walk algorithm. The resulting portions dictate the amount of pigment applied in each gestural stroke, aiming to cover the surface of the canvas as quickly as possible. Here, the works are executed in formats that replicate the sixteen paintings that comprised Thompson’s 2015 exhibition at the gallery. Installed in the same manner, Thompson has made five monochromatic variations of each work, representing the primary colors (red, blue, and yellow), as well as value (white and black).

This framework provides the basis for a biometrically secure punch clock designed by Thompson that will cycle through each of the 152,587,890,625 unique combinations possible for the installation. The current state of the clock as the gallery staff punches in each morning determines a daily reinstallation of the works, pulled from temporary storage racks built into the gallery’s offices. This cycle complicates the perceived formal purity of the monochrome, as the works on view are tied equally to the sixty-four paintings held in the racks, as they are to their own contingent modes of presentation. Organized by an internal logic, and subsumed by the larger structures in which they circulate, the borders of the individual paintings lose their definition, leaving them eroded and exhausted.

In 2017, Thompson’s work was the subject of an exhibition at The Brno House of Arts, Brno, Czechia, with Sam Lewitt. Other solo exhibitions include Cheyney Thompson The Completed Reference: Pedestals and Drunken Walks, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany, 2012, Cheyney Thompson: metric, pedestal, landlord, cabengo, recit, curated by João Ribas, MIT Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2012. His work has additionally been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Invisible Adversaries: Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 2016, Money, Good and Evil. A Visual History of Economics, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, Baden-Baden, Germany, 2016, A Slow Succession with Many Interruptions, SFMOMA, San Francisco, 2016, and Materials and Money and Crisis, Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, Austria, 2013, the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2008, among others. Thompson’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, SFMoMA, San Francisco, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Cassina Projects and ARTUNER are delighted to introduce Grim Tales, a new group show opening on September 7th, 2017 at Cassina Projects, New York City, featuring the works of Malte Bruns, Jamie Fitzpatrick, and Patrizio Di Massimo.

Stories of bravery and horror, of villains, of misty full moons, of dark and mysterious rooms in ancient castles. No matter our age, the folktales collected by the Brothers Grimm in the 19th century never fail to enchant us. The power of these stories lies beyond their fantastic setting and awesome events: they are timeless and archetypal; they challenge our point of view and sense of morality. While an indispensable repository of folklore, because of their multi-layered and symbolic nature, these stories were historically perceived as subversive and potentially dangerous tools. Indeed they were, for they took their readers on a fantastical journey of darkness and discovery. It is only in contemporary works able to do the same that we can discover the skilled storytellers of our own modern times.

Malte Bruns, Patrizio Di Massimo, and Jamie Fitzpatrick weave visual narratives of power, desire, and dread through their artworks, often evoking an uncannily mysterious, playful, and yet serious atmosphere. Akin to fairy tales, the artworks featured in this exhibition offer more than what is visible on the surface: they hold a revealing mirror up to contemporary society. These three artists share a penchant for the garish and provocative: through the use of bold colors and tantalizing aesthetics, their artworks portray disconcerting human stereotypes as well as chimeric monsters. Like folktales, they present the audience with a metaphorical dark forest: a space for awe and dismay in which the viewer is forced to confront both collective and personal nightmares.

Jamie Fitzpatrick’s wax sculptures draw the viewer into a satirical vortex of subverted expectations about what the medium itself should look like. The sloppy application of the waxy material results in distorted and seemingly precarious features of the characters portrayed. Much like the anti-hero, Fitzpatrick’s could be regarded as anti-sculpture: it takes a stance against monumentality and permanence. It makes the audience question the moral stature and valor of these officials of the past, still towering above us atop of their pedestals, although the significance of their deeds has long been forgotten. These sculptures are riotous; they even refuse to remain immobile and be subdued by the gaze of the viewer: timed mechanical components that set off at irregular intervals make noise and attract the audience’s attention to different parts of the statue, thus dictating the viewing experience.

The enticing characters of Patrizio Di Massimo’s paintings hold their pose with classical perfection, the light caresses their smooth bodies drawing out every supple muscle, every sensuous dimple. The erotic tension perspiring from the works is further emphasized by the shroud of mystery enveloping the scenes: they could be performing acts from an unknown play, where the curtain has been pulled in medias res and the audience is left to wonder about the gestures’ meaning and their consequences. Indeed, like in a circus, the bodies of the performers become a site for spectacle and wonder. But rather than focusing on gravity-defying acrobatic feats, Di Massimo’s characters seem to challenge moral preconceptions and domestic roles through either stereotype or strangeness.

The atmosphere evoked by Malte Bruns’ sculptures is that of a terrifying dungeon in a sci-fi fantasy movie. His life-like and yet horribly wrong heads and torsos simultaneously attract and repel the viewer; blue capillary wires run like blood vessels underneath the artificial skin, tricking the beholder into perceiving the object as human. Unexpectedly, cables gush out of the mauled synthetic flesh, where the trompe l’oeil ends abruptly, just like the boundaries of a movie set. The sculptures pointedly conjure a feeling of uncanniness: as suggested by the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in his pioneering 1906 essay on the subject, the Unheimlich may be triggered by too close a resemblance between art and nature, and the observer’s subsequent discovery that what once seemed life-like was, in fact, an automaton. Malte Bruns’ exploration of the thin line between artificiality and nature, between perfection and horror, serves as a stark reminder of our contemporary condition, one in which technological advancement in bionics could become as scary as the primordial fear of bodily decay.

David Zwirner is pleased to present recent paintings and works on paper by Suzan Frecon in concurrent exhibitions in New York and London, marking the artist’s first show in London and her fourth overall solo presentation with the gallery.

For almost five decades, Frecon has created abstract paintings that address issues of horizontality and verticality, asymmetrical balances, and interacting arrangements of color. Each composition is the result of a deliberative process guided by careful attention to spatial relationships. Working slowly, she accrues paint gradually, allowing the process of arriving at a given configuration to take ultimate precedence.

On view at 525 West 19th Street in New York will be large-scale oil paintings composed with asymmetrical curves that result in minor and major measured areas of color. One area cannot exist without the other(s) and each can be read, often interchangeably, as full and/or empty space. In tandem with the resulting colors and variations of the paint itself, these works convey their engagement with natural light. Depending on the viewer’s position and the time of the day, the contrasts of matte and sheen, positive and negative, and immediacy and radiance, combine to create an ongoing visual experience of always varying subtleties.

In some works, Frecon has arranged two panels side by side (rather than stacked), realizing compositions that depart from the central, vertical “line” in a play of dissonance, asymmetry, and imbalance between areas of color that nonetheless hold in proportional relationships to each other. These areas also stem from an underlying, rational horizontal line—invisible, but still generating the forms of curved openings or enclosures to become one irregular whole. All areas are ultimately generated by the predetermined outside mean of vertical to horizontal. The composition in each particular painting is the foundation of the paint’s culmination.

On view at 24 Grafton Street in London will be works on paper utilizing form found in the artist’s oil paintings. However, in contrast to the paintings, whose deliberate measurements underlie the compositions, her watercolors also engage the relationship between paint and paper support. Each predetermined sheet—often an agate-burnished old Indian ledger page—has its own innate character, properties, and irregular shape; its creases, holes, blemishes, and even faint writings become an integral component of the final watercolor. Yet, within Frecon’s practice, all works are considered part of the same unity, and one painting leads to another.

“I think that you can only understand paintings by actually seeing them. Their truth is the paint,” Frecon says.

Suzan Frecon was born in 1941 in Mexico, Pennsylvania. Following a degree in fine arts from the Pennsylvania State University in 1963, she spent three years at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and studying paintings in museums throughout Europe.

Since 2008, her work has been represented by David Zwirner. Previous shows at the gallery in New York include Suzan Frecon: recent painting (2010) and Suzan Frecon: paper (2013), a large-scale presentation of her works on paper from the past decade, which was presented concurrently with an exhibition of watercolors at Lawrence Markey in San Antonio, Texas. In 2015, Suzan Frecon: oil paintings and sun included the artist’s recent large-scale oil paintings at David Zwirner, New York.

Frecon has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally. In 2008, her work was the subject of a major solo exhibition, form, color, illumination: Suzan Frecon painting, at The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, which traveled to Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland. She has participated in a number of group exhibitions such as the 2000 and 2010 Whitney Biennial.

In 2016, Frecon received the Artists Award from the Artists' Legacy Foundation in Oakland, California.

Permanent collections which hold works by the artist include the Art Institute of Chicago; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland; The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She lives and works in New York.

Ad Reinhardt: Blue Paintings, organized by the Ad Reinhardt Foundation, will present the largest number of the artist's blue paintings ever shown together. Drawn exclusively from museum and private collections, this will be the first exhibition devoted entirely to this body of work since the artist's 1965 solo show at the Stable Gallery, New York, over fifty years ago.

Institutions lending to the show include: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

On the occasion of the exhibition, the Ad Reinhardt Foundation will be publishing a special volume of their ongoing catalogue raisonné project, dedicated to the blue paintings. This publication will include comprehensive documentation on each known work along with full color reproductions, as well as new scholarship on Reinhardt’s work.

David Zwirner is pleased to announce the gallery's first exhibition dedicated to the work of Ruth Asawa since having announced the representation of the artist's estate earlier this year, which will take place at the 537 West 20th Street location. The exhibition will bring together a selection of key sculptures, paintings, and works on paper spanning Asawa's influential practice, as well as rare archival materials, including a group of vintage photographs of the artist and her work by Imogen Cunningham.

Born in rural California, Asawa began to make art while detained in internment camps for Japanese Americans at Santa Anita, California, and Rohwer, Arkansas, where she was sent with her family in 1942-1943. Following her release, she enrolled in Milwaukee State Teachers College, eventually making her way to Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1946, then known for its progressive pedagogical methods and avant-garde aesthetic milieu. Asawa's time at Black Mountain proved formative in her development as an artist, and she was influenced there in particular by her teachers Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, and the mathematician Max Dehn.

Asawa is best known for her extensive body of looped-wire sculptures that challenge conventional notions of material and form through their emphasis on lightness and transparency, which she began making in the late 1940s while still a student at Black Mountain. Their unique structure was inspired by a 1947 trip to Mexico, during which local craftsmen taught her how to create baskets out of wire. While seemingly unrelated to the lessons of color and composition taught in Albers's legendary Basic Design course, these works, as she explained, are firmly grounded in his teachings in their use of unexpected materials and their elision of figure and ground: “I found myself experimenting with wire. I was interested in the economy of a line, enclosing three-dimensional space. The lesson taught us by Albers was to do something with a material which is unique to its properties. The artist must respect the integrity of the material. I realized that I could make wire forms interlock, expand, and contract with a single strand because a line can go anywhere.”1

Asawa executed her looped-wire sculptures in a number of complex, interwoven configurations throughout her career, a variety of which will be on view in the exhibition. These range from small spheres to long, elaborate examples of the artist’s “form within a form” compositions, in which she created nested shapes from a single continuous line of looped wire; as well as lesser-known forms including hyperbolic shapes, suspended cones, and interlocking spheres.

Also on view will be examples of Asawa's related tied-wire sculptures, a series begun in 1962, which like much of her oeuvre explore organic forms and processes. After having been gifted a desert plant whose branches split exponentially as they grew, Asawa quickly became frustrated by her attempts to replicate its structure in two dimensions. Instead, she utilized industrial wire as a means of sculpting, and in doing so studying its shape. In the ensuing decades, she created numerous hanging and wall-mounted variations on this form.

A selection of the artist's rarely seen paintings and works on paper, executed during her time at Black Mountain, will be presented alongside her three-dimensional works. For example, in her “In and Out” compositions, Asawa creates variations on a chevron pattern, utilizing subtle modifications to create a sense of depth and motion within the otherwise flat picture plane. In another group of works, she incorporates the simple shape of the Dogwood leaf, folded and overlapped into varying configurations, to compose dynamic color studies. In still another work, Asawa uses a “BMC” stamp from the school's laundry facility to create an allover, undulating composition. Seen in this context, the graphic optical effects deployed in these early compositions reveal the genesis of Asawa's interest in repeated forms, motion, and collapsing pictorial space that logically culminate in her wire sculptures.

On the occasion of the exhibition, a monographic catalogue will be published by David Zwirner Books, which will include new scholarship on Asawa's groundbreaking body of work by art historian Tiffany Bell, as well as an essay by Robert Storr, and an illustrated chronology.

Asawa's work will concurrently be on view in Josef and Anni and Ruth and Ray, the inaugural exhibition at David Zwirner's new Upper East Side location at 34 East 69th Street.

American sculptor, educator, and arts activist Ruth Asawa(1926-2013) is recognized both for her pioneering contributions to twentieth century sculpture as well as arts curricula in San Francisco and nationwide. She studied at Milwaukee State Teachers College, Wisconsin (1943-1946) and Black Mountain College, North Carolina (1946-1949); and later received Honorary Doctorates from the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland (now California College of the Arts; 1974), the San Francisco Art Institute (1997), and San Francisco State University (1998).

In addition to her wire sculptures, Asawa is well known for her public commissions, particularly in San Francisco and the wider Bay Area. These include the much beloved fountains in Ghirardelli Square (1968) and outside the Grand Hyatt San Francisco (1973), the latter of which comprises hundreds of Baker's Clay images molded by local schoolchildren, friends, and other artists cast in bronze. Upon moving to San Francisco in 1949, Asawa, a firm believer in the radical potential of arts education from her time at Black Mountain College, devoted herself to expanding access to art-focused educational programs. She co-founded the Alvarado Arts Workshop in 1968 and was instrumental in the opening of the first public arts high school in San Francisco in 1982, which was renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in her honor in 2010. Asawa believed that “Art will make people better, more highly skilled in thinking and improving whatever business one goes into, or whatever occupation. It makes a person broader.”²

Asawa's work has been exhibited widely throughout the world since the early 1950s, including solo exhibitions at Peridot Gallery, New York in 1954, 1956, and 1958. In 1965, Walter Hopps organized a solo exhibition of the artist's sculptures and drawings at the Pasadena Art Museum (now Norton Simon Museum) in California, where the artist completed a residency at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop the same year. Other significant solo presentations include those held at the San Francisco Museum of Art (1973); Fresno Art Museum, California (traveled to Oakland Museum of California; 2001-2002); de Young Museum, San Francisco (2006); Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas (2012); and Norton Simon Museum of Art, California (2014).

The artist's work is represented in prominent museum collections, including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; San Jose Museum of Art, California; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Asawa has been the recipient of numerous prestigious awards.

Field Projects is pleased to present Show #45: SAHANA RAMAKRISHNAN, A NIGHT IN THE WOODS, curated by Jacob Rhodes.

A Night in the Woods comprises of new mixed media paintings, etchings and installation by Brooklyn based artist Sahana Ramakrishnan.

The show’s central figure is a centaur with two sets of genitals who meekly wields a sword and shield. This unlikely creature is the channel through which ideas of masculinity, patriarchy, and idolatry are brought to life in a surreal landscape of false trees and man-made nature. Meek though he may be, we are confronted with the feeling that this environment we have entered is his own domain; that he is both our guide and our greatest peril.

But the artist offers us a companion with whom we can traverse these dark woods: A female figure whose face is at all times obscured. Though her conduct may seem questionable by modern standards of feminism, she is the closest thing we have in this place to a protagonist.

The show is laden with allusions to spirituality and its cliches as Ramakrishnan draws her imagery and symbols as chimeras stitched together from fragments of Hindu, Buddhist, and Greek mythologies, as well as from contemporary narratives and culture surrounding spirituality. The flat-out mythical nature of her works is extremely personal, as symbols or imagery that have pervaded pop culture and collective consciousness are perverted, morphed, turned upside down by the artist’s hand. As the protagonist, the artist and ourselves grapple with our relations to these mutated versions of symbols that have historically been interpreted and passed on by men, a strange journey of sexual and spiritual exploration unfolds.

About the artist:

Sahana Ramakrishnan was born in Mumbai, India and raised in Singapore. She travelled to the United States to complete her BFA in Painting at RISD, and has since been living and working in Brooklyn. Sahana’s work has been exhibited in Gateway Project Spaces, Elizabeth Foundation of the Arts, A.I.R. Gallery, Front Art Space, and more. She is currently a fellow at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking workshop and was a recipient of the Feminist-in-Residence program at Gateway Project Spaces, the Yale/Norfolk Summer program, and the Florence Lief grant from RISD.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to announce Rosalyn Drexler: Occupational Hazard, an exhibition of paintings and drawings at 545 West 20th Street. Opening on Thursday, September 7, 2017, the exhibition is the first presentation of Drexler’s work since her recent retrospective at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University (2016; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2016–2017; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis, 2017). Ten of the artist’s bold, psychologically complex paintings will be on view, as well as a selection of rare works on paper

The show will focus on Drexler’s work since 1986, a remarkably prolific yet underappreciated period in the artist’s oeuvre. In these paintings, while favorite themes from her sixties repertoire persist—violent transactions, dubious business, murders, and sex—her subjects/compositions are more surreal and open-ended. Frequently, the figures wear masks or face away from the viewer. For Drexler, masking underlines the interchangeability of her cast of criminals, businessmen, and politicians, and further dramatizes their menace. Artists, whether friends (such as Andy Warhol) or not (such as Jean-Michel Basquiat), and artworks by herself and others, also figure into these paintings, echoing the intensification during the 1980s of Drexler’s reflexive preoccupation with the art world. In an homage to Henri Rousseau, Sueño Revista (Rosalyn and Sherman in a Rousseau) (1989), Drexler inserts herself and her late husband, the artist Sherman Drexler, into an emulation of The Dream (1910). Replacing Rousseau’s exotic nude with an image of herself bewitched by the music of some magical Shermanesque creature, Drexler celebrates her love and artistic subjectivity as seduced daydreamer.

One of the most significant works in the exhibition, Portrait of the Artist (1989), underlines the importance of both painting and writing to Drexler’s creative persona. It features a masked figure in a painterly frame with brush in hand and a “beanie with an airplane at the top.” The airplane symbolizes the “traveling mind of a writer,” the artist explains. In particular, the mask highlights Drexler’s association with theater; it also points to the hide-and-seek/hide-to-reveal game so fundamental to her work since the sixties, as well as to her lifelong role-playing as both a woman and an artist. Its “useful clothes” effect a potent cross-dressing that echoes the artist’s generous embrace of all kinds of difference, as often revealed in her plays and novels. Despite the red boots and polished nails, the suit and tie render Portrait of the Artist into a desexualizing reprise of Drexler’s earlier, subtly transgressive Self-Portrait (1964). This is one of the artist’s great strengths. For all their luridness, her narratives remain ambiguous. Viewers can speculate about the story, but that is all they can do because the story never fully reveals itself.

Born in 1926 in Bronx, New York, Rosalyn Drexler first began exhibiting her work during the late 1950s. Since then, she has had 20 solo exhibitions, including at Reuben Gallery (1960, New York), Kornblee Gallery (1964, 1965, 1966, New York), and Pace Gallery (2007, New York). In 1986, a retrospective of her work—Rosalyn Drexler: Intimate Emotions—opened at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University. Another survey exhibition, Rosalyn Drexler and the Ends of Man, took place in 2006 at Rutgers University’s Paul Robeson Gallery (Newark, New Jersey).

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Drexler’s paintings were featured in many important museum exhibitions, such as Pop Art USA (1963, Oakland Art Museum, California), The Painter and the Photograph (1964, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University), American Pop Art (1974, Whitney Museum of American Art), and Another Aspect of Pop Art, (1978, P.S. 1, Institute for Art and Urban Resources, New York). In 2010, her work figured prominently in Sid Sachs’ landmark exhibition Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968 (2010, University of the Arts, Philadelphia), as well as Power Up: Female Pop Art at the Kunsthalle Wien. More recently, Drexler’s paintings were included in Pop to Popism at Australia’s Art Gallery of New South Wales (2014–2015, Sydney); International Pop (2015–2016, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis); Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection (2016–2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York); and Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965 (Grey Art Gallery, New York University).

Drexler’s paintings are in the collections of many museums, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; the Allen Memorial Art Gallery, Oberlin College; the Colby College Museum of Art; the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College; the Grey Art Gallery, New York University; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution; the Museum of Modern Art; the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University; the Wadsworth Athenaeum; the Walker Art Center; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In addition to her work as a visual artist, Drexler is also an accomplished novelist and playwright. She published her first play in 1963 and her first novel in 1965. She is the recipient of three Obie Awards, as well as an Emmy Award for her work on Lily Tomlin’s television special Lily (co-written with Richard Pryor).

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Rosalyn Drexler.

Rosalyn Drexler: Occupational Hazard will be on view at Garth Greenan Gallery, 545 West 20th Street (between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues), through Saturday, October 21, 2017. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. For more information, please contact the gallery at (212) 929-1351, or email info@garthgreenan.com.

Galerie Lelong & Co. is pleased to present Protruding Patterns, a solo exhibition of work by Beijing-based artist Lin Tianmiao that will transform the main gallery with woven carpets. For the first time, viewers are encouraged to touch Lin’s intricate, labor-intensive work with textiles and thread.

Over the past six years, Lin has collected around 2,000 words and expressions about women in various languages. Pulling from popular novels, newspapers, the internet, and colloquial dialogues, she has gathered phrases such as “divinité,” “Mori girl,” and “leftover women.” Some are predictably derogatory to women, demonstrating the continued ubiquity of sexist attitudes reinforced by language, while others are directly recovered from obsolescence, representing the nuanced mix of confusion, humor, self-deprecation, and empowerment that accompanies the shifting consciousness of women. This lexicon is woven into thickly raised wool forms so that viewers can feel the visceral and literal protruding patterns while touching and walking on the carpets.

By making visible and tangible the various definitions of womanhood that transcend cultures and time, Lin creates an immersive platform to explore how women feel within their evolving societal roles. Meanwhile, the examination of feminine semiotics highlights the disparity that still remains between much-advocated gender equality and culturally embedded gender discrimination. Despite the subject matter of the work, Lin Tianmiao eschews the typical, Western label of a “feminist artist” given that the notion of feminism emerged from different social and cultural contexts within China and abroad.

The exhibition will also feature a selection of new paintings and sculptures in the adjacent gallery, which continue Lin’s exploration of “body language.” Sculptures combining bones with ordinary tools create visual puns, akin to her More or Less the Same (2011) series. In one of the new sculptures, bones form the underside of a clothing hanger, while in another a thermometer is embedded into a bone. These contradictory materials blur the line between binaries such as subject and object, yin and yang, and interior and exterior, challenging the distinction between normal and abnormal. For Lin, bones eliminate the boundaries of social classes, cultures, political ideologies, and species in light of a shared mortality.

Lin Tianmiao (b. 1961) is among the first generation of Chinese contemporary artists to receive international recognition. The work Protruding Patterns was shown at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2014); Long Museum, Shanghai (2016); and Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (2016). Protruding Patterns is Lin’s first major solo exhibition in New York since 2012, when she presented Bound Unbound at the Asia Society Museum and Badges at Galerie Lelong & Co. This fall, Lin will also be featured in Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Lin will present a solo exhibition at the Shanghai Museum of Glass, which will simultaneously feature her work in the group exhibition Annealing. In Spring 2018, Lin will also present a solo exhibition at the Bund Art Museum, Shanghai. Her work is in many prestigious institutions worldwide including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hong Kong Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Art Museum of China, Beijing; National Museum of Australia, Canberra; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Seattle Art Museum; Shanghai Museum of Glass; Sherman Foundation, Sydney; and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

Stanley Whitney has been exploring the formal possibilities of color within ever-shifting grids of multi-hued blocks and all-over fields of gestural marks and passages, since the mid-1970s. His exhibition at Lisson Gallery New York will be the first major presentation of his drawings, highlighting important works from 1989 to the present. Whitney’s works on paper are a critical component of his practice, in which he develops his spatial structure and experiments with the placement of color.

Whitney’s signature format revolves around his use of a loose grid and it is within his sketchbooks and drawings that Whitney works through the abstract structure of colored blocks and lines, testing combinations, arrangements, density and transparency of colors to evoke a sense of rhythm and cadence. Whitney has noted: “For me, drawing is a way to understand where things are in space. I felt that I needed to work on space because I didn’t want my color to be decorative. I wanted color to have real intellect.”

In Whitney’s work, color functions as both the design, creating shape and arrangement, and also as the energy, simultaneously attracting and distracting from the color laid beside it. The colors are meant to be seen next to and in relation to the others, rather than as individual blocks. While the drawings and paintings share the importance of space and sequencing of hue — and the gesture of the paintings maintain a sketching quality with the deliberate presence of the artist’s hand — the works on paper do not adhere to a square format as the paintings do. Instead, they tend to fill the rectangular page. Thus, by their format alone the drawings allow for an entirely fresh approach to the grid and pose a different challenge to creating the desired ‘call and response’ between colors. They incorporate a wider variety of color and texture — Whitney uses mediums including colored pencil, graphite, acrylic marker and crayon on surfaces as varied as Indian paper, Japanese rice papers and cardboard.

In his early drawings Whitney experiments with space in a freer format, with marks that are gestural and loose and the areas of color or space between horizontals are sparse and circular. Following a visit to Italy and Egypt in the early 1990s, he begins to experiment with the density of the color within the structure, as inspired by the classical and ancient architecture of the regions. Building these blocks of color, stacked on top of one another across the horizontal lines, the structure becomes more organized and the grids more precise and angular over the following decades.

To accompany the exhibition, the gallery will publish a facsimile of one of Whitney’s sketchbooks, illustrating his working process and the way in which he orchestrates shape and color.

Lisson Gallery is pleased to announce the representation of the Leon Polk Smith Foundation in cooperation with Washburn Gallery. The gallery will present a solo exhibition of works by the artist September 8 to October 21 in New York. The presentation will feature a selection of paintings and works on paper from the 1960s and early 1970s, most of which have never before been displayed. To accompany the exhibition, Lisson Gallery will produce a catalogue featuring an essay by the poet and critic John Yau, as well as previously unpublished archival material.

Considered one of the founders of the hard-edge style of minimalist art, Leon Polk Smith rose to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s with his distinctive shaped canvas series — the Correspondences. These large canvases typically consist of two vibrantly-colored painted shapes defined by a precise but often irregular contour. While Minimalist peers of his during that time were shifting away from Modernism and rejecting relationality, Smith was wholeheartedly advancing the formal and rational elements of the Modernist tradition.

Smith was born in 1906 in Chikasha, Indian Territory, the eighth of nine children to parents who were each part Cherokee and had migrated to the region from Tennessee in the wake of the great land rush in the late 1880s. One year after Smith’s birth, Indian Territory was absorbed into the state of Oklahoma. After a childhood raised farming and ranching amongst large populations of Choctaws and Cherokees, and an adolescence spent building roads in Arizona during the Great Depression, Smith studied English at Oklahoma State College (now East Central University), graduating in 1934. In addition to his literary curriculum, Smith took great interest in art and enrolled in studio art courses by his final year. He moved to New York shortly thereafter, where he earned a masters degree from the prestigious Teachers College at Columbia University, focusing on arts education. While in New York he was able to further explore his interest in fine art.

As a student, Smith admired the work of Fernand Léger, Jean Arp, and Constantin Brancusi, but found the ultimate importance in the influence of Piet Mondrian and his interchangeability of form and space. It was in New York that he first encountered the work of Piet Mondrian during a visit to the Albert Eugene Gallatin Collection in the Museum of Living Art, then at the University of New York. Seeing these works first-hand had a profound impact on the course of his own journey to abstraction.

After matriculation, Smith moved South to Georgia to teach. Having a steady job allowed Smith to seriously pursue his art making. When he found the racial intolerance of Georgia to be too great, he moved further north to Delaware, re-connecting with the New York arts scene. By the early 1940s, his work had quickly caught the attention of New York galleries and his first solo exhibition took place in New York at the Uptown Galleries in January 1941.

In 1944 Smith served as an assistant to Hilla Rebay, Director of Solomon R. Guggenheim's Museum of Non-Objective Painting. Rebay became a key mentor to Smith at this time. From 1949 to 1951 he taught art at Rollins College in Florida, and through the mid-1950s held teaching positions at New York University and at Mills College of Education in New York City. In the mid-to late 1940s, Smith began to paint in a more hard-edge, geometric style, strongly influenced by Mondrian. His work swiftly evolved into formats with straight and curving shapes of color and the use of tondo (round) canvases. From 1958 to 1961 the pivotal dealer Betty Parsons represented his work, which introduced him to a wider audience of museum curators and art collectors.

Smith developed a core group of friends and fellow painters in New York, including Carmen Herrera and Barnett Newman. Herrera and Smith were close neighbors, both experimenting with bold color and a straightforward style after the war in relative obscurity in downtown Manhattan. Smith remained supportive of Herrera’s work as he became recognized and exhibited within New York galleries, and they would remain close until his death.

In addition to his impact on his peers, a budding generation of painters, including Ellsworth Kelly, Al Held, John McLaughlin, and Jack Youngerman, had all visited Smith’s studio in the mid-1950s. By the 1960s critics such as Lawrence Alloway and Nicolas Calas were touting Smith’s role as their precursor, noting his influence on younger hard-edge painting practitioners.

Smith established a key motif while perusing an athletic catalogue in the late 1940s. Examining the pencil drawings of baseballs and tennis balls in it, Smith began to imagine that from these simple shapes he could create a new kind of space. As he described:

“It was flat and the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does. And so I thought, maybe that is because that’s on the tondo. I’ve got to find out if that is true or not. I’ve got to do some on a rectangle to see if the form and the space still moved in every direction. And it did. So it was exciting to do a painting on a rectangle that seemed to have a curved surface. It was the first, you see that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art.”

In the 1960s Smith's circular explorations culminated in his shaped, multi-part Constellation series of paintings and drawings, among his most exuberant and inventive compositions. Attracting increased attention, Smith's work was soon included in two seminal group exhibitions in New York, The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art (1965) and Systemic Painting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1966), which would contextualize his work amongst the other Modern masters of his time. He was awarded his first international solo exhibition in September 1962 at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas, Venezuela.

A retrospective of Smith’s work was organized by The Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 1996. His work is in numerous public and private collections worldwide including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, USA; Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, USA; The Brooklyn Museum, New York, USA; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, USA; Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Arkansas, USA; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, USA; Detroit Institute of Art, Michigan, USA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., USA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California, USA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA; Morgan Library and Museum, New York, USA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Germany; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; MACBA – Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany; and Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia, Canada, among others. A solo exhibition of Smith’s drawings and collages will be on view at Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York this Fall. Geometry in Motion: Leon Polk Smith Works on Paper opens October 7 and marks the first-ever museum exhibition of Smith’s work in the medium.

The Leon Polk Smith Foundation was established by the artist and has been active since Smith's death in 1996 at the age of ninety. Its mission is to preserve and promote Smith's art and legacy. More information on the Leon Polk Smith can be found at the foundation's website, leonpolksmithfoundation.org.

Magnan Metz is pleased to present Now Those Days Are Gone, an exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Duke Riley. The show is both an homage to and extension of Riley's critically acclaimed public artwork Fly by Night (2016), commissioned by Creative Time and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and is comprised of actual elements from that project as well as new work inspired by it.

The exhibition marks the artist’s fifth show with Magnan Metz and will be on view September 27 - October 21 at 524 West 26th Street, an expansive temporary space. A selection of work from Riley’s projects over the past decade will also be on view at the gallery's adjacent, permanent 521 West 26th Street address. An opening reception with the artist will take place at 524 West 26th Street on Thursday, September 28, from 6 – 8 p.m.

Now Those Days Are Gone includes a series of large-scale photographs, each measuring 71 1/2 x 107 1/2 inches, taken during Fly by Night. The images document the flight patterns of thousands of pigeons carrying tiny LED lights that were released at dusk from a historic boat docked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, once home to the country's biggest naval fleet of pigeon carriers.

The suite of photographs captures the pigeons' luminous and elegant paths above New York's East River; the long exposure shots create abstract images, drawings etched out of the night sky by the pigeons themselves. Creative Time stated: “Riley's Fly by Night (is) a tribute to the beautiful, diverse and fascinating histories of pigeon flying and New York City.”

The show will also feature 1,000 individual, hand-painted and embroidered portraits of pigeons from the Fly by Night fleet installed around the circumference of the gallery's sky lit walls. Each canvas depicts a single pigeon with its moniker and the name of its loft and crew embroidered beneath it. This information is typically found on a bird's leg band and is a nod to a tradition deeply rooted in New York City pigeon keeping culture. In some instances, the different types of breeds inform the pigeons' assigned names and make related references. For example, two Egyptian Swifts are named Cleopatra and Nefertiti, one Damascene bird, Nassrin Abdallah, is named after a Commander in the Syrian Women’s Protection Unit, and New York Flight pigeons are named after New York streets such as Jackie Robinson, Schermerhorn and Myrtle. Lastly, personality, physical traits and the artist's own sense of humor determined the naming of pigeons like Luke Floorwalker, Foghorn Leghorn and Quilty.

A portion of the façade from one of the shipboard coops collaboratively designed by Duke Riley and Olson Kundig Architects for Fly by Night will also be on view. The facade features a large mural painting and references Cobb Dock, a manmade island in Brooklyn’s Wallabout Bay, which housed the Navy’s first and largest messenger pigeon fleet in operation from the late 1860s until 1901.

Additionally, Now Those Days Are Gone includes three wall-based mosaic pieces: a monumental 3 1/2 x 14 foot work meticulously comprised of seashells and two 6 x 6 foot square format mosaics each depicting a falcon attacking a pigeon with taloned feet. The creation of Riley's “Death From Above” series was in direct response to the post-2016 U.S. election turmoil, the timing of which also coincided with the winter season when hawks most aggressively prey on New York City's pigeons. Hawks have been a long-standing symbol of fascist power, and just as all pigeon fanciers are forced to remain helpless amidst the destruction of their most beloved from above, Riley simultaneously grappled with the notions of fear, paralysis and resistance in the face of the country's charged political climate.

Duke Riley (b. 1972, Boston) received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Pratt Institute. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and projects presented by Creative Time and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, NY (2016); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2010-11); Philagrafika at the Philadelphia Historical Society (2010); and the Queens Museum, NY (2009-10). Group shows include ones at the Brooklyn Museum, NY; MoMA PS1, NY; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana; the New York Historical Society; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Park Avenue Armory, NY; and the Parrish Art Museum, Watermill, NY, among others.

Riley has produced commissions for New York City’s Percent for Art program (2015) and MTA Arts for Transit (2010); participated in the 10th Havana Biennial (2015); Brazil’s Mercosul Biennial (2011); and held the First St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Havana as part of the Havana Biennial (2009). In 2012 Riley was selected by the U.S. State Department’s smARTpower project to be a cultural ambassador to China. Riley has completed residencies at The MacDowell Colony and Yaddo (2017); Creative Time's Global Residency Program for Eastern Africa (2013); Gasworks Residency in London (2012); and was a visiting artist at Ox-Bow (2012). In 2015 he received Pratt Institute’s Mid-Career Achievement Award and has been awarded grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2010-11) and the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2011).

For more information, please visit www.magnanmetz.com and follow us @magnanmetz on Instagram and Twitter.

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Falcon’s Fortress, Diana Al-Hadid’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition brings together the artist’s largest presentation of wall works in New York along with new sculptures and works on Mylar, all of which are created by layered drips of material that form both their physicality and imagery. These seemingly frozen drips evoke a mythic realm, simultaneously in the throes of creation and dissolution, where landscape and architecture meld and the historic feels present and immediate. Falcon’s Fortress will be presented from September 16 through October 21 in the gallery’s 509 W. 24th Street location.

Al-Hadid returns to an interest sparked seven years ago in innovations in early time-telling devices, namely those perfected by the 13th century Islamic Golden Age inventor and important scholar Al-Jazari, and outlined in his “Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices.” Where she previously took inspiration from him for the creation of a fictional water clock, for this show she closely examines his candle clock devices, which measure the passage of time by the decreasing weight and shortening length of candlesticks. For one such work, Al-Hadid constructs the core operational elements of the “Candle Clock of the Swordsman,” adding her own design modifications to expose the internal mechanics for audiences to view. Al-Hadid activated the clock timed to the August 2017 solar eclipse, honoring the long history of Islamic scholars and astronomers, who established observatories as early as the 9th century C.E. The activation of the clock concurrently memorialized the rare event and completed the sculpture as “candle wax”—actually made with gypsum—overflowed onto the work. The alteration of the “candle wax” reflects the artist’s continued play with material illusion.

Al-Hadid’s unique process of controlled dripping and pooling of materials is seen clearly in her wall panels, which range in scale from about 14 x 11 feet to 5 x 4 feet. With the panels, the structure and the skin of the work are one. In effect, the brushstroke precedes the canvas, with the painted image diligently reinforced and the voids created as a result of areas left unpainted. For the new works in Falcon’s Fortress, Al-Hadid rotates her panels in the process of making, causing the drips to flow in different directions as she builds up the scenes, appearing as if woven. The resultant work is somewhere between tapestry and fresco, the image carefully stitched together and the pigments impregnated in the material. Architectural forms and landscapes disappear into abstraction as quickly as they emerge, drawing the viewer into a liminal space between the two.

For this series of panels, Al-Hadid looks to another Islamic polymath, the 15th century, Bosnian-born Matrakçi Nasuh. A renowned mathematician, cartographer, and swordsman, Nasuh was also a celebrated miniaturist who traveled with the Ottoman army painting highly detailed panoramic views of the cities and suburbs between Istanbul and Baghdad, and other territories on his expeditions. His delicate collection, “Menazilname,” was a vividly painted catalogue of the various edifices, campsites, waterways, flora, and fauna that populated the Empire. One such depiction is of the Citadel that dominates the city of Aleppo, the artist’s birthplace, which Al-Hadid casts and bends to form a “sheath” or protective fortress around the internal mechanisms of another of Al-Jazari’s candle clocks, in which balls measuring the passage of time fall through a sculpted falcon. This sculpture will be positioned at the center of the exhibition, connecting to the other works through the recurring image of the falcon, which plays the role of observer, documentarian, and perhaps even guardian. When viewed together, the falcon appears to alight from the clock traveling through the various lands, on a journey through history and ingenuity.

More About Diana Al-Hadid
Diana Al-Hadid was born in Aleppo, Syria in 1981. She was raised in Ohio, and currently lives in Brooklyn. Al-Hadid’s work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; NYUAD Art Gallery, Abu Dhabi; Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University, New Orleans; Jaffe-Friede Gallery at Dartmouth College, Hanover; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland; and San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, among others. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at Saatchi Gallery, France; Thessaloniki State Museum of Contemporary Art, Greece; The Flag Art Foundation, New York; Barjeel Art Foundation, UAE; MASS MoCA, North Adams; Haugar Art Museum, Norway; Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa; John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco; and deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, among many others. She received a BFA in Sculpture and a BA in Art History from Kent State University (2003), an MFA in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond (2005), and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine (2007).

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Sanford Biggers’ Selah, the artist’s inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery. Taking inspiration from American History and the human form, Biggers will create an experience that highlights often overlooked cultural and political narratives through symbolic gestures and imagery. The title of the exhibition, Selah, is a word that appears in the Hebrew Bible 74 times but has no known meaning. It has been interpreted in some cases to give instruction about pausing to listen. Selah will be on view from September 7 to October 21, 2017 in the gallery’s 507 W. 24th Street space, with a special installation presented in one of the gallery’s viewing rooms.

Biggers’ expansive body of work encompasses painting, sculptures, textiles, video, film, multi-component installations, and performance. His syncretic practice positions him as a collaborator with the past, adding his own voice and perspective to those who made and used the antique quilts, African sculptures, and cultural imagery his work references. Biggers cuts, paints, reshapes, and alters objects and images—both found and created by himself—leveraging their formal and conceptual qualities to reimagine and amplify certain narratives and perspectives. His works speak to current social, political, and economic happenings as well as to the historic context that bore them. The interrelated components and aesthetic diversity of Biggers’ works provide a multifaceted platform for dialogue and debate.

Selah – Anchoring the exhibition is Seated Warrior, a new figure from his BAM series, which includes videos and bronze works made from wooden African sculptures that the artist collected, dipped in wax, and transmogrified with piercing bullets and subsequently cast in bronze as a response to recent and ongoing occurrences of police brutality against Black Americans. Seated Warrior, punctured by a single gunshot, expands the series beyond the recognition and remembrance of these tragedies into an exploration of the human condition and the desire for transcendence. Seated Warrior will be presented in the gallery’s viewing room in a meditative environment that allows for contemplation.

Of the work Biggers said, “Central to the theme of this exhibition is the potential of objects to transform our experience and understanding of the human condition. This includes a cycle of life and death, and within it a relationship between the living and the dead. Veneration both honors those who have passed and seeks their guidance and perspective. In this way, Seated Warrior acts as a gatekeeper to the rest of the exhibition, allowing visitors to meditate on both the experiences of the dead and on the path forward for those of us still here.”

Among the other works in the exhibition are several multi-panel paintings composed of framed and unframed antique quilt segments that Biggers has organically pieced together. Drawn to respond not only to the patterns and colors of the textiles, but to their deeper meanings, Biggers paints and draws—using acrylic and spray paint, tar, charcoal and oilstick—on the quilts themselves as well as on the glass under which he places them.

As with the BAM series, the body is a critical component of these works. The antique quilts serve as signifiers of bodily protection, presence and absence, and the conflated histories that are sewn onto each surface. The quilts provide warmth; hold the legends of their use as signposts on the Underground Railroad; and contain the presence of the original makers’ hands in the stitches, appliques, and patterns. These are among the various narratives Biggers responds to when working with them.

“These quilts in most cases are over hundreds of years old. Some have already been altered and re-contextualized by subsequent owners and I see myself as a late collaborator, contributing to their history and function in this present moment. Perhaps decades from now, this work will also be re-contextualized, creating an ongoing narrative over time,” said Biggers. “It’s very much like history itself, a patchwork of experiences, perspectives, and reportage that attempt to construct a single narrative but these works recognize that history is always subject to time itself, and subsequently unfixed.”

More About Sanford Biggers
Biggers’ practice has been celebrated through solo exhibitions nationally and internationally, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Massimo de Carlo Gallery, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum, and Sculpture Center, among numerous others. His works have appeared in venues worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Barnes Foundation, Tate Britain and Tate Modern, Whitney Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York as well as institutions in China, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Poland and Russia. He has participated in notable exhibitions such as Prospect 1 New Orleans Biennial, Illuminations at the Tate Modern, Performa 07 in New York, and the Whitney Biennial. His works are also included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum and Bronx Museum. In winter 2017, Biggers was awarded the prestigious Rome Prize in Visual Arts by the American Academy in Rome. He is Associate Professor and Director of Sculpture at Columbia University's Visual Arts program. Originally from Los Angeles, Biggers has been based in New York since 1999.

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Robert Adams: Trees, the next exhibition in his gallery at 523 West 24th Street. Featuring more than thirty gelatin silver prints made between 1968 and 2014, the exhibition is the first to examine this principal subject in the artist’s work.

For over fifty years Robert Adams has photographed the changing landscape of the American West. Human development’s impact on the land has been his primary focus, but so too has the region’s sublime natural beauty. For Adams, trees have always played a central role in both sides of this story, from clear-cut stumps on a logged mountainside to centuries-old Sitka spruces in the coastal rainforest.

Each photograph in the exhibition is a product of the artist’s sustained attentiveness to a specific setting. The locations of his photographs include Colorado, his home for many years; Utah; California; Washington; and Oregon, where he now lives. As Adams said in a 1994 interview, “What I'm after are characteristic views, and I can't know if a view is characteristic until I've seen a place again and again, through all kinds of hours and seasons.”

The exhibition features photographs of iconic American trees as well as non-native species that have become an integral part of our landscape. Several prints focus on rows of eucalyptus, a species first introduced to California from Australia in the nineteenth century. Planted as windbreaks for the region’s citrus orchards, they are seen towering above abandoned farmland soon to be enveloped by suburban sprawl.

For Adams, trees combine the noble stillness of landscape with an almost human vitality. In this sense they have a unique power to provoke the conscience and stir the imagination. “The example of trees,” Adams has said, “does suggest a harmony for which it seems right to dream.”

Robert Adams (b. 1937) has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as numerous awards, including the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and the Hasselblad Award. His 2010–14 retrospective The Place We Live, organized by the Yale University Art Gallery, traveled to eight museums around the world, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, and the Jeu de Paume, Paris.

Robert Adams: Trees is on view at 523 West 24th Street from September 8 to October 21, 2017, Tuesday through Saturday, from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

Catlin, a master printmaker, has evolved his oeuvre to include large- and small-scale paintings, drawings, sculpture, stained glass and, for this exhibition, a site-specific mural joining the gallery's two main spaces. The works follow a linear narrative featuring nameless characters in strange and often ominous seeming situations. In a forest filled with smoke, figures gather to perform bizarre rites that are dark and yet necessary for survival. Soon, the woods burn down, only to be flooded, stranding the dwindling populace on an endless ocean. A snakebitten hand and a raised axe appear destined to meet. A knife stuck into a smoke-shrouded stump appears again on a drifting dinghy. Filled with allegory and symbolisms, each work is a standalone scene but fits into the greater storyline from the mind of the artist.

Nathan Catlin received his MFA in visual arts from Columbia University in 2012, with special focus on printmaking. Since then he has been an adjunct professor teaching relief printmaking at Columbia University and has shown his art around the country and internationally. This is his first solo show with Davidson Contemporary.

Trevor Paglen will present public walk-throughs of the exhibition at 3:00 p.m. on
September 9 and 23. On September 16 at 1:00 p.m., he will be joined in discussion by leading computer vision and artificial intelligence researcher and AI Now Initiative co-founder Kate Crawford.

Trevor Paglen’s A Study of Invisible Images is the first exhibition of works to emerge from his ongoing research into computer vision, artificial intelligence (AI) and the changing status of images. This body of work has formed over years of collaboration with software developers and computer scientists and as an artist-in-residence at Stanford University. The resulting prints and moving images reveal a proliferating and otherwise imperceptible category of “invisible images” characteristic of computer vision.

Paglen’s exhibition focuses on three distinct kinds of invisible images: training libraries, machine-readable landscapes, and images made by computers for themselves. For Machine-Readable Hito, for example, Paglen took hundreds of images of artist Hito Steyerl and subjected them to various facial recognition algorithms. This portrait of Steyerl presents the images alongside metadata indicating the age, gender, emotional state and other signifiers that the algorithms have interpreted from the images. For other portraits in the show, Paglen trained facial recognition software to read the faces of deceased philosophers, artists and activists. Ghostly images of Frantz Fanon, Simone Weil and others show the facial signatures—the unique qualities of faces as determined by biometric recognition software— that are used by computer vision to identify individuals.

To make the prints in Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, Paglen trained an AI to recognize images associated with taxonomies such as omens and portents, monsters, and dreams. A second AI worked in tandem with the first to generate the eerie, beautiful images that speak to the exuberant promises and dark undercurrents characterizing our increasingly automated world.

The video installation Behold These Glorious Times! brings together hundreds of thousands of training images routinely used for standardized computer vision experiments and pairs them with visual representations of an AI learning to recognize the objects, faces, expressions and actions. A loose narrative begins to emerge about the collapsing distinctions between humans, machines and nature. Electronic musician Holly Herndon composed a soundtrack using libraries of voices created to teach AI networks how to recognize speech and other acoustic phenomena.

A Study of Invisible Images builds on Sight Machine, a work staged in San Francisco earlier this year in collaboration with the Kronos Quartet. As the quartet played a concert, cameras attached to computer vision algorithms used in self-driving cars, guided missiles, spy satellites and other autonomous vision systems projected what they “saw” onto a screen behind the musicians.

Paglen has upcoming exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. He has had one-person shows at Secession, Vienna; the Berkeley Art Museum; Kunsthall Oslo; and the Frankfurter Kunstverein. His work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Tate Modern; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; MIT List Visual Arts Center; Haus der Kunst, Munich; and the Walker Art Center. He participated in the 2009 Istanbul Biennial, 2012 Liverpool Biennial, 2013 ICP Triennial and the 2016 Gwangju Biennale. He has received numerous awards, including the 2014 Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the 2016 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. He has written The Last Pictures, a critical compendium of his Creative Time project to launch an ultra-archival disc micro-etched with one hundred photographs into orbit; Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World; and I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon’s Black World. Paglen’s article “Invisible Images: Your Pictures are Looking at You” about computer vision and artificial intelligence was published by The New Inquiry in December 2016.

In 1956, Frank Sinatra conducted an album for Capitol Records called Tone Poems of Color. The record consists of twelve tracks inspired by the poetry of Norman Sickle, each piece written by a notable 20th Century Hollywood composer and designated by a color as its title. In the manner of mid-1800’s European orchestral music, these “tone poems” attempt to translate the emotive and narrative content latent in non-musical sources directly into sound.

Tim Bavington’s celebrated oeuvre takes this idea of translation head on, considering the correlative, reciprocal, and at times ambiguous relationship between the visual and aural, art and music. The artist’s approach to geometric abstraction is based in a complex system of annotation and interpretation, whereby popular songs’ musical “DNA” (e.g. melody, beat, etc.) find subjective representation in color and form. This, in effect, is Bavington’s conceptual framework for making paintings.

Inspired by Sinatra’s record, the artist’s latest studio work explores the nuances and energy of individual colors. The basis for each painting is a musical composition with a single color in the title: Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze, for instance. Whereas much of Bavington’s previous output delivered color at “full volume,” many of the new paintings reflect a lowering of chromatic intensity, as well as a broader tonal range and more limited palette. Morgan Lehman is delighted to present these works in Tim Bavington’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.